Historically, coastal railway system has suffered many incidents of damage and failure due to storm hazards. Such incidents include inundation of track structure that causes safety hazards, operational restrictions, and damages to rail tracks due to scour in the embankment or ballast and failure of tracks and ties. Considering the importance of the rail system in the freight and passenger transport and the safety concerns that failure in rail system incurs, there is a major need to first determine the vulnerabilities and second to devise mitigation solutions to improve the safety of coastal rail system. Determining track vulnerabilities requires fragility models. Fragility
models map the characteristics of the rail tracks and the severity of the storms to the probability of failure and are key components in risk analysis of infrastructure systems. The only rail track fragility model that is available is the model developed in Japan for flooding impact on railroads. This fragility model is not developed for coastal railroads subjected to storm surge and wave. Furthermore, as railroad configuration in the USA is significantly different from Japan, the fragility model does not provide a robust estimate of failure probabilities in coastal railroads in the USA. To address this limitation, we will develop a US specific data driven fragility model for rail embankments, ballast, track and ties when subjected to storm induced surge and wave loads. For this purpose, we have partnered with CN railway and have access to damage data (in coastal tracks in Gulf of America’s coast) from Hurricane Ida and Isaac. In this process, we first simulate Hurricane Ida and Isaac in ADCIRC and SWAN hydrodynamic platform to determine max surge and wave and duration of inundation for the coastal rail tracks and then merge them with the damage data obtained from CN railway to perform a logistic regression to determine fragility functions for rail tracks. Such fragility models can be used in risk informed decision making to improve the safety of coastal railroads and reduce the direct and indirect economic, operational, and disruption costs of the US rail system.